RIM CEO Prays iPhone and Android Security Will Fail

After spending the remainder of last week regretting what he said at the beginning of the week, Research in Motion's (RIMM) new CEO Thorsten Heins continues to survey his empire and is now weighing his options on how to pull the company out from the doldrums.

A new and exciting OS delivered on a fleet of exceptional devices would be ideal. A point-by-point plan on developing features missing from iPhone (AAPL) or Android (GOOG) devices would be acceptable. Explaining how RIM can compete with the likes of Microsoft (MSFT) and Nokia's (NOK) latest projects would be the least he could do.

However, gambling that the security to your chiefest competitors fails is not exactly the soundest of plans.

In a recent New York Times article, Brian X. Chen describes BlackBerry's steep descent in North America's enterprise market, as well as its fall in Europe. As it stands, BlackBerry, Android, and iPhone usage runs just about even among information workers. However, Forrester analyst Frank Gillett commented on how BlackBerry is bleeding users in the workplace, saying, "Android and Apple together are eating BlackBerry's lunch." Nick McQuire, Research director at the International Data Corporation, added that Android and Apple are running "neck and neck" as the top mobile enterprise platforms in Europe.

Nothing we didn't already know.

So what's a CEO of a flailing mobile manufacturer to do? Well, hope for the utter failure of the leaders, that's what!

Claiming to hear negative reviews from IT workers who use Android and iPhone devices, Heins remarked, "They are in a pickle. Their pickle is security." Adding, "When the first big security flaw even happens in one of the large enterprises, you will see this turn around. Wait for the day this happens."

We surely hope you're not, Thorsten.

Apple and Google have already amassed a lion's share of the market by continuing to deliver amazing products. And with its Lumia line, Microsoft and Nokia have proven they still have some fight left in them as well. RIM, on the other hand, has remained complacent in a cutthroat industry and has subsequently fallen so far behind, there's little likelihood it will ever regain the ground it once had. One need only look at former Palm boss Jon Rubenstein's exit from Hewlett Packard (HPQ) to see where complacency and a total lack of innovation will land you in the smartphone industry.

But here we are, a week since RIM announced its new CEO, and the soundbites continue to be extremely disconcerting. Between his original plans to "stay the course," his immediate backpedeling, and now his admittance that RIM is depending on a giant security failure to make his company look better, Heins has enough verbal gaffes in a week to go toe-to-toe with his predecessors.